Academic literature on the topic 'Oceania, antiquities'

In the missionary museum “Forum der Völker”, founded by the Franciscan religious order, ethnographic objects – in particular ritual implements or religious art – were transferred to a Christian context by reinterpreting them as counter-images for the missionary task. Missionaries commodified devices of local worship and showed an ambivalence towards human remains and weapons. The museum’s collection was extended in the past thirty years by private collections, including objects obtained by the military from the colonial period or of antiquities theft by art lovers. The initial provenance research in the museum used archive material, gathered information by studying the objects and conducted interviews with relevant actors. The implication of the findings revealed unclear changes of ownership and various potentially sensitive acquisition contexts that offers an orientation in how to deal with objects of problematic provenance in a missionary context.

AbstractSince the nineteenth century, today's South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. These moral geographies of “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This article explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how networks of scholars, intellectuals, and art collectors linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shaping these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism by following object-biographies and focusing on knowledge exchange via the networks they connected, and by exploring the possibilities, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. The article conceptualizes moral geographies as a heuristic device to understand how people have imagined their belonging to a transnational space—in this case Greater India—whether they live inside or outside of that space. It examines the impact these moral geographies have on processes of inclusion and exclusion, particularly their common disregard for Indonesia's Islamic cultures. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows, as these can exaggerate the region's cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

The remains of ancient ships from various time periods are commonly found on land and under the sea in conditions that make it difficult to reconstruct their original form and structure. For this reason, the reconstruction should be supported by other data, such as data on similar ships, but also by certain assumptions. The results of the reconstruction are significant not only in a historical sense but are of exceptional importance when building floating replicas. Two ships, Nin 1 and Nin 2, today for promotional purposes known as Condurae Croaticae, were found in Nin (Croatia) at the end of the 1960s. They are about 8 to 10 m long, and tentatively dated to the 11th century AD, although there are indications that they could be dated two centuries later. Based on archaeological finds exhibited in the Museum of Nin Antiquities, hull line drawings were created, according to which two floating replicas were made at the end of the 1990s. Considering the problem of hogging that appeared in both ships, a new proposal for the reconstruction of the original hull lines was performed based on the available documentation. The aim of this paper is a systematic analysis of its calm water resistance. Based on the established credibility of experimental testing, a scale model (1:4 ratio) of the Nin 1 vessel is constructed and evaluated through towing tank experiments. The second approach, the CFD method, is a reliable numerical method for calm resistance estimation, but it is rarely used in the analysis of ancient ships. Finally, the widely used empirical Holtrop method is also applied, but it was developed for ships of larger dimensions and with large parts of flat bottoms and, therefore, the more appropriate Delft Hull Yacht Series method is also tested. The results obtained by applying the four mentioned methods are compared and discussed.

In this article, I explore the sale of pre-Hispanic textiles from Andean countries, especially Peru, demonstrating networks between collectors, auction houses and researchers. Sir Henry S. Wellcome (1856-1936) was a North American pharmaceutical entrepreneur. After transferring his commercial interests to London in 1880, he bought textiles and other antiquities at auctions. I outline the activities of Wellcome staff in registering the textiles in Wellcome’s store at Willesden, London. Textiles which preserve Wellcome labels now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and the National Museums of Liverpool are described. I examine the case of a distinctive Wari tapestry cut into pieces, of which Wellcome acquired two fragments, as an Andean diaspora via Germany to the UK and the US. One of the fragments was donated in 1951 to the British Museum, London, and the other in 1965 to the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles. Between 1949 and 1983, the Trustees of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum distributed many artefacts to museums in the UK, the Commonwealth and the US. The sixth distribution (1951) is analysed in the light of hierarchical relationships between the museums involved. I reflect on Andean textiles lacking in provenance as orphans separated from their cultural context, especially in relation to Paracas textiles sold in a notorious Puttick & Simpson auction in 1933, at which Wellcome made purchases. En este artículo se examina la venta de algunos textiles prehispánicos del Perú, demostrando redes entre coleccionistas, casas de subastas e investigadores. Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (1856-1936) fue un empresario farmacéutico norteamericano. Después de transferir sus intereses comerciales a Londres en 1880, comenzó a comprar textiles y otras antigüedades vendidas en subasta. Se presentan las actividades del personal de Wellcome en el registro de los textiles en el depósito de Wellcome en Willesden, Londres. Se describen los textiles, que aún conservan las etiquetas Wellcome y que ahora se encuentran en el Museo de Arqueología y Antropología de la Universidad de Cambridge y los Museos Nacionales de Liverpool. El caso de un inusual tapiz Wari cortado en pedazos, del cual Wellcome adquirió dos fragmentos, se considera como una diáspora andina vía Alemania hacia el Reino Unido y los Estados Unidos. Uno de los fragmentos fue donado en 1951 al Museo Británico de Londres y el otro en 1965 al Museo Fowler de Los Ángeles. Entre 1949 y 1983, los Fideicomisarios del Museo Médico Histórico Wellcome distribuyeron muchos artefactos andinos a algunos museos en el Reino Unido, la Commonwealth y los Estados Unidos. Se analiza la sexta distribución (1951) en la luz de las relaciones jerárquicas entre los diferentes museos involucrados. Se ofrece una reflexión sobre los textiles andinos carentes de procedencia como huérfanos separados de su contexto cultural, especialmente en relación con los textiles de Paracas vendidos en una notoria subasta de Puttick & Simpson en 1933, en la que Wellcome realizó compras.

In 1999, the TV movie Shark Attack depicted an attack by mutant great white sharks on the population of Cape Town. By the time the third entry in the series, Shark Attack 3, aired in 2002, mutant great whites had lost their lustre and were replaced as antagonists with the megalodon: a giant shark originating not in any laboratory, but history, having lived from approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. The megalodon was resurrected again in May 2021 through a trifecta of events. A video of a basking shark encounter in the Atlantic went viral on the social media platform TikTok, due to users misidentifying it as a megalodon caught on tape. At the same time a boy received publicity for finding a megalodon tooth on a beach in South Carolina on his fifth birthday (Scott). And finally, the video game Stranded Deep, in which a megalodon is featured as a major enemy, was released as one of the monthly free games on the PlayStation Plus gaming service. These examples form part of a larger trend of alleged megalodon sightings in recent years, emerging as a component of the modern resurgence of cryptozoology. In the words of Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist who both popularised the term and was a leading figure of the field, cryptozoology is the “science of hidden animals”, which he further explained were more generally referred to as ‘unknowns’, even though they are typically known to local populations—at least sufficiently so that we often indirectly know of their existence, and certain aspects of their appearance and behaviour. It would be better to call them animals ‘undescribed by science,’ at least according to prescribed zoological rules. (1-2) In other words, a large aspect of cryptozoology as a field is taking the legendary creatures of non-Western mythology and finding materialist explanations for them compatible with Western biology. In many ways, this is a relic of the era of European imperialism, when many creatures of Africa and the Americas were “hidden animals” to European eyes (Dendle 200-01; Flores 557; Guimont). A major example of this is Bigfoot beliefs, a large subset of which took Native American legends about hairy wild men and attempted to prove that they were actually sightings of relict Gigantopithecus. These “hidden animals”—Bigfoot, Nessie, the chupacabra, the glawackus—are referred to as ‘cryptids’ by cryptozoologists (Regal 22, 81-104). Almost unique in cryptozoology, the megalodon is a cryptid based entirely on Western scientific development, and even the notion that it survives comes from standard scientific analysis (albeit analysis which was later superseded). Much like living mammoths and Bigfoot, what might be called the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ serves to reinforce a fairy tale of its own. It reflects the desire to believe that there are still areas of the Earth untouched enough by human destruction to sustain massive animal life (Dendle 199-200). Indeed, megalodon’s continued existence would help absolve humanity for the oceanic aspect of the Sixth Extinction, by its role as an alternative apex predator; cryptozoologist Michael Goss even proposed that whales and giant squids are rare not from human causes, but precisely because megalodons are feeding on them (40). Horror scholar Michael Fuchs has pointed out that shark media, particularly the 1975 film Jaws and its 2006 video game adaptation Jaws Unleashed, are imbued with eco-politics (Fuchs 172-83). These connections, as well as the modern megalodon’s surge in popularity, make it notable that none of Syfy’s climate change-focused Sharknado films featured a megalodon. Despite the lack of a Megalodonado, the popular appeal of the megalodon serves as an important case study. Given its scientific origin and dynamic relationship with popular culture, I argue that the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ illustrates how the boundaries between ‘hard’ science and mythology, fiction and reality, as well as ‘monster’ and ‘animal’, are not as firm as advocates of the Western science tradition might believe. As this essay highlights, science can be a mythology of its own, and monsters can serve as its gods of the gaps—or, in the case of megalodon, the god of the depths. Megalodon Fossils: A Short History Ancient peoples of various cultures likely viewed fossilised teeth of megalodons in the area of modern-day Syria (Mayor, First Fossil Hunters 257). Over the past 2500 years, Native American cultures in North America used megalodon teeth both as curios and cutting tools, due to their large size and serrated edges. A substantial trade in megalodon teeth fossils existed between the cultures inhabiting the areas of the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River Valley (Lowery et al. 93-108). A 1961 study found megalodon teeth present as offerings in pre-Columbian temples across Central America, including in the Mayan city of Palenque in Mexico and Sitio Conte in Panama (de Borhegyi 273-96). But these cases led to no mythologies incorporating megalodons, in contrast to examples such as the Unktehi, a Sioux water monster of myth likely inspired by a combination of mammoth and mosasaur fossils (Mayor, First Americans 221-38). In early modern Europe, megalodon teeth were initially referred to as ‘tongue stones’, due to their similarity in size and shape to human tongues—just one of many ways modern cryptozoology comes from European religious and mystical thought (Dendle 190-216). In 1605, English scholar Richard Verstegan published his book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, which included an engraving of a tongue stone, making megalodon teeth potentially the subject of the first known illustration of any fossil (Davidson 333). In Malta, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, megalodon teeth, known as ‘St. Paul’s tongue’, were used as charms to ward off the evil eye, dipped into drinks suspected of being poisoned, and even ground into powder and consumed as medicine (Zammit-Maempel, “Evil Eye” plate III; Zammit-Maempel, “Handbills” 220; Freller 31-32). While megalodon teeth were valued in and of themselves, they were not incorporated into myths, or led to a belief in megalodons still being extant. Indeed, save for their size, megalodon teeth were hard to distinguish from those of living sharks, like great whites. Instead, both the identification of megalodons as a species, and the idea that they might still be alive, were notions which originated from extrapolations of the results of nineteenth and twentieth century European scientific studies. In particular, the major culprit was the famous British 1872-76 HMS Challenger expedition, which led to the establishment of oceanography as a branch of science. In 1873, Challenger recovered fossilised megalodon teeth from the South Pacific, the first recovered in the open ocean (Shuker 48; Goss 35; Roesch). In 1959, the zoologist Wladimir Tschernezky of Queen Mary College analysed the teeth recovered by the Challenger and argued (erroneously, as later seen) that the accumulation of manganese dioxide on its surface indicated that one had to have been deposited within the last 11,000 years, while another was given an age of 24,000 years (1331-32). However, these views have more recently been debunked, with megalodon extinction occurring over two million years ago at the absolute latest (Pimiento and Clements 1-5; Coleman and Huyghe 138; Roesch). Tschernezky’s 1959 claim that megalodons still existed as of 9000 BCE was followed by the 1963 book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, a posthumous publication by ichthyologist David George Stead. Stead recounted a story told to him in 1918 by fishermen in Port Stephens, New South Wales, of an encounter with a fully white shark in the 115-300 foot range, which Stead argued was a living megalodon. That this account came from Stead was notable as he held a PhD in biology, had founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, and had debunked an earlier supposed sea monster sighting in Sydney Harbor in 1907 (45-46). The Stead account formed the backbone of cryptozoological claims for the continued existence of the megalodon, and after the book’s publication, multiple reports of giant shark sightings in the Pacific from the 1920s and 1930s were retroactively associated with relict megalodons (Shuker 43, 49; Coleman and Huyghe 139-40; Goss 40-41; Roesch). A Monster of Science and Culture As I have outlined above, the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ had as its origin story not in Native American or African myth, but Western science: the Challenger Expedition, a London zoologist, and an Australian ichthyologist. Nor was the idea of a living megalodon necessarily outlandish; in the decades after the Challenger Expedition, a number of supposedly extinct fish species had been discovered to be anything but. In the late 1800s, the goblin shark and frilled shark, both considered ‘living fossils’, had been found in the Pacific (Goss 34-35). In 1938, the coelacanth, also believed by Western naturalists to have been extinct for millions of years, was rediscovered (at least by Europeans) in South Africa, samples having occasionally been caught by local fishermen for centuries. The coelacanth in particular helped give scientific legitimacy to the idea, prevalent for decades by that point, that living dinosaurs—associated with a legendary creature called the mokele-mbembe—might still exist in the heart of Central Africa (Guimont). In 1976, a US Navy ship off Hawaii recovered a megamouth shark, a deep-water species completely unknown prior. All of these oceanic discoveries gave credence to the idea that the megalodon might also still survive (Coleman and Clark 66-68, 156-57; Shuker 41; Goss 35; Roesch). Indeed, Goss has noted that prior to 1938, respectable ichthyologists were more likely to believe in the continued existence of the megalodon than the coelacanth (39-40). Of course, the major reason why speculation over megalodon survival had such public resonance was completely unscientific: the already-entrenched fascination with the fact that it had been a locomotive-sized killer. This had most clearly been driven home by a 1909 display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, Bashford Dean, an ichthyologist at the museum, reconstructed an immense megalodon jaw, complete with actual fossil teeth. However, due to the fact that Dean assumed that all megalodon teeth were approximately the same size as the largest examples medially in the jaws, Dean’s jaw was at least one third larger than the likely upper limit of megalodon size. Nevertheless, the public perception of the megalodon remained at the 80-foot length that Dean extrapolated, rather than the more realistic 55-foot length that was the likely approximate upper size (Randall 170; Shuker 47; Goss 36-39). In particular, this inaccurate size estimate became entrenched in public thought due to a famous photograph of Dean and other museum officials posing inside his reconstructed jaw—a photograph which appeared in perhaps the most famous piece of shark fiction of all time, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws. As it would turn out, the megalodon connection was itself a relic from the movie’s evolutionary ancestor, Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, from the year before. In the novel, the Woods Hole ichthyologist Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film) proposes that megalodons not only still exist, but they are the same species as great white sharks, with the smaller size of traditional great whites being due to the fact that they are simply on the small end of the megalodon size range (257-59). Benchley was reflecting on what was then the contemporary idea that megalodons likely resembled scaled-up great white sharks; something which is no longer as accepted. This was particularly notable as a number of claimed sightings stated that the alleged megalodons were larger great whites (Shuker 48-49), perhaps circuitously due to the Jaws influence. However, Goss was apparently unaware of Benchley’s linkage when he noted in 1987 (incidentally the year of the fourth and final Jaws movie) that to a megalodon, “the great white shark of Jaws would have been a stripling and perhaps a between-meals snack” (36). The publication of the Jaws novel led to an increased interest in the megalodon amongst cryptozoologists (Coleman and Clark 154; Mullis, “Cryptofiction” 246). But even so, it attracted rather less attention than other cryptids. From 1982-98, Heuvelmans served as president of the International Society of Cryptozoology, whose official journal was simply titled Cryptozoology. The notion of megalodon survival was addressed only once in its pages, and that as a brief mention in a letter to the editor (Raynal 112). This was in stark contrast to the oft-discussed potential for dinosaurs, mammoths, and Neanderthals to remain alive in the present day. In 1991, prominent British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker published an article endorsing the idea of extant megalodons (46-49). But this was followed by a 1998 article by Ben S. Roesch in The Cryptozoology Review severely criticising the methodology of Shuker and others who believed in the megalodon’s existence (Roesch). Writing in 1999, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, arguably the most prominent post-Heuvelmans cryptozoologists, were agnostic on the megalodon’s survival (155). The British palaeozoologist Darren Naish, a critic of cryptozoology, has pointed out that even if Shuker and others are correct and the megalodon continues to live in deep sea crevasses, it would be distinct enough from the historical surface-dwelling megalodon to be a separate species, to which he gave the hypothetical classification Carcharocles modernicus (Naish). And even the public fascination with the megalodon has its limits: at a 24 June 2004 auction in New York City, a set of megalodon jaws went on sale for $400,000, but were left unpurchased (Couzin 174). New Mythologies The ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ is effectively a fairy tale born of the blending of science, mythology, and most importantly, fiction. Beyond Jaws or Shark Attack 3—and potentially having inspired the latter (Weinberg)—perhaps the key patient zero of megalodon fiction is Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, which went through a tortuous development adaptation process to become the 2018 film The Meg (Mullis, “Journey” 291-95). In the novel, the USS Nautilus, the US Navy’s first nuclear submarine and now a museum ship in Connecticut, is relaunched in order to hunt down the megalodon, only to be chomped in half by the shark. This is a clear allusion to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), where his Nautilus (namesake of the real submarine) is less successfully attacked by a giant cuttlefish (Alten, Meg 198; Verne 309-17). Meanwhile, in Alten’s 1999 sequel The Trench, an industrialist’s attempts to study the megalodon are revealed as an excuse to mine helium-3 from the seafloor to build fusion reactors, a plot financed by none other than a pre-9/11 Osama bin Laden in order to allow the Saudis to take over the global economy, in the process linking the megalodon with a monster of an entirely different type (Alten, Trench 261-62). In most adaptations of Verne’s novel, the cuttlefish that attacks the Nautilus is replaced by a giant squid, traditionally seen as the basis for the kraken of Norse myth (Thone 191). The kraken/giant squid dichotomy is present in the video game Stranded Deep. In it, the player’s unnamed avatar is a businessman whose plane crashes into a tropical sea, and must survive by scavenging resources, crafting shelters, and fighting predators across various islands. Which sea in particular does the player crash into? It is hard to say, as the only indication of specific location comes from the three ‘boss’ creatures the player must fight. One of them is Abaia, a creature from Melanesian mythology; another is Lusca, a creature from Caribbean mythology; the third is a megalodon. Lusca and Abaia, despite being creatures of mythology, are depicted as a giant squid and a giant moray eel, respectively. But the megalodon is portrayed as itself. Stranded Deep serves as a perfect distillation of the megalodon mythos: the shark is its own mythological basis, and its own cryptid equivalent. References Alten, Steven. Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Alten, Steven. The Trench. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999. Atherton, Darren. Jaws Unleashed. Videogame. Hungary: Appaloosa Interactive, 2006. Benchley, Peter. Jaws: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep. Los Angeles: TarcherPerigee, 2003. Couzin, Jennifer. “Random Samples.” Science 305.5681 (2004): 174. Davidson, Jane P. “Fish Tales: Attributing the First Illustration of a Fossil Shark’s Tooth to Richard Verstegan (1605) and Nicolas Steno (1667).” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 150 (2000): 329–44. De Borhegyi, Stephan F. “Shark Teeth, Stingray Spines, and Shark Fishing in Ancient Mexico and Central America.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17.3 (1961): 273–96. Dendle, Peter. “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds.” Folklore 117.2 (2006): 190–206. Flores, Jorge, “Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.3 (2007): 553–81. Freller, Thomas. “The Pauline Cult in Malta and the Movement of the Counter-Reformation: The Development of Its International Reputation.” The Catholic Historical Review 85.1 (1999): 15–34. Fuchs, Michael. “Becoming-Shark? Jaws Unleashed, the Animal Avatar, and Popular Culture’s Eco-Politics.” Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture. Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018. 172–83. Goss, Michael. “Do Giant Prehistoric Sharks Survive?” Fate 40.11 (1987): 32–41. Guimont, Edward. “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.” Contingent Magazine, 18 Mar. 2019. 26 May 2021 <http://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/>. Heuvelmans, Bernard. “What is Cryptozoology?” Trans. Ron Westrum. Cryptozoology 1 (1982): 1–12. Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1975. Lowery, Darrin, Stephen J. Godfrey, and Ralph Eshelman. “Integrated Geology, Paleontology, and Archaeology: Native American Use of Fossil Shark Teeth in the Chesapeake Bay Region.” Archaeology of Eastern North America 39 (2011): 93–108. Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Mayor, Adrienne. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Meg, The. Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Warner Brothers, 2018. Mullis, Justin. “Cryptofiction! Science Fiction and the Rise of Cryptozoology.” The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape. Eds. Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead. London: Routledge, 2019. 240–52. Mullis, Justin. “The Meg’s Long Journey to the Big Screen.” Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Rip-Offs. John LeMay. Roswell: Bicep Books, 2020. 291–95. Naish, Darren. “Tales from the Cryptozoologicon: Megalodon!” Scientific American, 5 Aug. 2013. 27 May 2021 <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/cryptozoologicon-megalodon-teaser/>. Pimiento, Catalina, and Christopher F. Clements. “When Did Carcharocles Megalodon Become Extinct? A New Analysis of the Fossil Record.” PLoS One 9.10 (2014): 1–5. Randall, John E. “Size of the Great White Shark (Carcharodon).” Science 181.4095 (1973): 169–70. Raynal, Michel. “The Linnaeus of the Zoology of Tomorrow.” Cryptozoology 6 (1987): 110–15. Regal, Brian. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Roesch, Ben S. “A Critical Evaluation of the Supposed Contemporary Existence of Carcharodon Megalodon.” Internet Archive, 1999. 28 May 2021 <https://web.archive.org/web/20131021005820/http:/web.ncf.ca/bz050/megalodon.html>. Scott, Ryan. “TikTok of Giant Shark Terrorizing Tourists Ignites Megalodon Theories.” Movieweb, 27 May 2021. 28 May 2021 <https://movieweb.com/giant-shark-tiktok-video-megalodon/>. Shark Attack. Dir. Bob Misiorowski. Martien Holdings A.V.V., 1999. Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Dir. David Worth. Nu Image Films, 2002. Shuker, Karl P.N. “The Search for Monster Sharks.” Fate 44.3 (1991): 41–49. Stead, David G. Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. Stranded Deep. Australia: Beam Team Games, 2015. Thone, Frank. “Nature Ramblings: Leviathan and the Kraken.” The Science News-Letter 33.12 (1938): 191. Tschernezky, Wladimir. “Age of Carcharodon Megalodon?” Nature 184.4695 (1959): 1331–32. Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. 1870. New York: M. A. Donohue & Company, 1895. Weinberg, Scott. “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.” eFilmCritic! 3 May 2004. 20 Sep. 2021 <https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9135&reviewer=128>. Zammit-Maempel, George. “The Evil Eye and Protective Cattle Horns in Malta.” Folklore 79.1 (1968): 1–16. ———. “Handbills Extolling the Virtues of Fossil Shark’s Teeth.” Melita Historica 7.3 (1978): 211–24.

Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has taken on new practices and meanings. The use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, and networks of information mediate our interactions with others, as well as the ways we conceptualise what it means to be human, including where the body begins and ends. In turn, digital health technologies and ‘wellness’ cultures such as those promoted on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook have also shaped our understanding of ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’, their parameters, and how they ought to be practiced and felt (Baker; Lupton Digital Health; Lupton et al.). For millennia, aspects of human bodies have been documented and materialised in a variety of ways to help people understand states of health and illness: including relationships to the environments in which they lived. Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies have long emphasised the kinds of vibrancies and distributed agencies that are part of reciprocal more-than-human ‘manifestings’ of kinships, and have called for all people to adopt the role of stewards of the ecosystem (Bawaka Country et al.; Hernández et al.; Kimmerer; Rots; Todd; Tynan). In Western cultures, ideas of the human body that reach back to ancient times adopt a perspective that viewed the continuous flows of forces (the four humours) in conjunction with the elements of air, wind, earth, and fire inside and outside the body as contributing to states of health or ill health. It was believed that good health was maintained by ensuring a balance between these factors, including acknowledgement of the role played by climactic, ecological, and celestial conditions (Hartnell; Lagay). A more-than-human approach is beginning to be re-introduced into Western cultures through political activism and academic thinking about the harms to the planet caused by human actions, including global warming and climate crises, loss of habitats and ecological biodiversity, increased incidence of extreme weather events such as bushfires, floods, and cyclones, and emerging novel pathogens affecting the health not only of humans but of other living things (Lewis; Lupton Covid Societies; Lupton Internet of Animals; Neimanis et al.). Contemporary Western more-than-human philosophers argue for the importance of acknowledging our kinship with other living and non-living things as a way of repositioning ourselves within the cosmos and working towards better health and wellbeing for the planet (Abram; Braidotti; Plumwood). As these approaches emphasise, health, wellbeing, and kinship are always imbricated within material-social assemblages of humans and non-digital things which are constantly changing, and thereby generating emergent rather than fixed capacities (Lupton "Human-Centric"; Lupton et al.). In this article, we describe our More-than-Human Wellbeing exhibition. To date, new media, Internet, and communication studies have not devoted as much attention to more-than-human theory. It is this more-than-digital and more-than-human approach to health information and wellbeing that marks out our research program as particularly distinctive. Our research focusses on the many and varied digital and non-digital forms that information about health and bodies takes. We are interested in health data as they are made and form part of the objects and activities of people’s everyday lives and aim to expand the human-centric approach offered in digital health by positioning human health and embodiment as always imbricated within more-than-human ecosystems. We acknowledge that all environments (natural and human-built) are intertwined with humans, and that to a greater or lesser extent, all are configured with and through the often exploitative and extractive practices and ideologies of those living in late modern societies in which people are positioned as superior to and autonomous from other living things. Together with more-than-human scholarship, we take inspiration from work in which arts-based, multisensory, and museum curation methods are employed to draw attention to the intertwining of people and ecologies (Endt-Jones; Howes). Our exhibition was planned as a research translation and engagement project, communicating several of our studies’ findings in arts-based media (Lupton "Embodying"). In what follows, we outline the concepts leading to the creation of our exhibits and describe how these pieces materialise and extend more-than-human concepts of wellbeing and care. Five of the exhibits we created for this exhibition are discussed. They all draw on our research findings across a range of studies, together with more-than-human theory and medical history (Lupton "More-Than-Human"). We describe how we used these pieces to materialise more-than-human concepts of health, wellbeing, and kinship in ways that we hoped would provoke critical thought, affective responses, and open capacities for action for contributing to both human and nonhuman flourishing. The background, thinking, and modes of making leading to the creation of ‘Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities’, ‘Smartphone Fungi’, ‘Hand of Signs’, ‘Silken Anatomies’, and ‘Talking/Flowers’ are explained below. Bodily Curios Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Reclaimed timber, found objects, resin 3D prints. 2023. Fig. 1: Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Fig. 2: Detail from Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. The objects we have placed in Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities (figs. 1 and 2) mix together such things from the past as prosthetic human eyeballs and teeth used in medicine and dentistry in earlier eras. This collection of found and manufactured objects, both old and new, draws on the concept of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as cabinets of wonder, which first became popular in the sixteenth century. Artefacts were assembled together for viewing in a room or a display case. The items were chosen for being notable in some way by the curator, including objects from natural history, antiquities, and religious relics, as well as works of art. These collections, purchased, curated, and assembled by members of the nobility or the wealthy as a marker of refinement, knowledge, or social status, were the precursor of museums (Endt-Jones). We see digital devices such as mobile phones as one of a multitude of ways that operate to document and preserve elements of human embodiment – indeed, as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Our cabinet also refers to the tradition of medical museums, which display preserved human organs, body parts, and tissue in glass bottles for pedagogical purposes. Under this model of health, specimens of both ‘ideal’ health and also ‘ill’ health – abnormalities in the flesh – were documented as a means of categorising wellbeing. Museums such as these would often treat diseased and disabled bodies as oddities and artefacts of ‘curiosity’. In this work, we reimagine and wind back this way of thinking, through displaying and drawing attention and curiosity towards signs of the body and the everyday. We are showing that wellbeing is more than a process of categorisation, comparison, or measurement of ‘ideal’ or ‘abnormal’; it is in the traces we leave behind us when we return to the earth. Our information data are human remains, moving as endless constellations of the interior and exterior of the body (Lupton Data Selves). In this artwork, both reclaimed wood and 3D-printed resin were used as a synergy between the natural and synthetic. Taking our cue from the manner of display of these items in medical museums, we have added our own curios, including 3D-printed body organs sprouting fungi (fig. 2), as a way of demonstrating the entanglements between humans and the fungal kingdom. Interspersed among these relics of human bodies is a discarded mobile phone with its screen badly shattered. It is displayed as a more recent antiquated object for making images and collecting, storing, and displaying information and images about human bodies, which itself is subject to disastrous events despite its original high-tech veneer of glossy impermeability. Technologies are more-than-flesh as human-made simulacra of body parts. Our wellbeing is sensed and made sense of through bodies’ entanglements of human and nonhuman. These curios both materialise traces of our bodies and wellbeing and extend our bodies into the physical spaces we inhabit and through which we move. Reading the Traces and Signs Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Smartphone Fungi. Recycled European oak, 3D printed resin, CNC carved plywood. 2023 Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Hand of Signs. Laser-etched walnut and plywood. 2023. Fig. 3: Smartphone Fungi. / Fig. 4: Detail from Smartphone Fungi. Wellbeing is also a process of mark-making, realised through the reciprocal impressions we leave on each other and the world around us. In Smart Phone Fungi (figs. 3 and 4) we capture the idea of ‘recording’ that takes place between people, technologies, and the natural world. It was inspired by a huge tree which members of our team noticed on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. Growing from this tree were fungi of similar size and shape to the smartphone that was used to capture the image. In our interpretation, a piece of reclaimed timber was used to represent the tree, itself marked by its human use, and fungal shapes replicating those on the tree were produced using computer numerical controlled (CNC) carving. The central timber post is covered with human and more-than-human traces, such as old tool marks, weather damage, and wood borer holes. Alongside these traces, the CNC-carved fungi forms add a conspicuously digital layer of human intervention. Fig. 5: Hand of Signs. In Hand of Signs (fig. 5), we extend this idea of both organic and digital data traces as something that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. Inspired by the practice of palmistry, this work re-interprets line reading, the historical wooden anatomical model, and human body scanning as ways of reading for signs of wellbeing in past and future. Palm readers interpret people’s character, health, longevity, and other aspects of their lives through the creases and traces of development, wear, and deteriorations in the skin of our hands (Chinn). Life leaves its traces on our palms. The piece also refers to the newer tradition of digitising human bodies (Lupton Quantified Self; Lupton et al.), employing scanning and data visualising technologies, which uses spatial GPS data to deduce patterns of human activity. For both palmistry and in more contemporary monitoring technologies, one’s wellbeing can be deduced through the map: the lines of the palm and the errant traces collected by satellites and sensors. To reflect this relation between mapping and palmistry, our updated anatomical model references both the contours of 3D geospatial data and of the human palm. However, this piece looks to represent more layers of data beyond those captured by GPS data. By using reclaimed wood to construct this human hand model, we are again making an analogy between the marks of growth and life that timber displays and those that the human body bears and develops as people move through more-than-worlds throughout their lifespans. The piece also seeks to draw attention to the various ‘signs’ that have been used across centuries to interpret the current and future health and wellbeing of humans (once markings on or morphologies of the body, now often the digitised visualisations of the internal operations and physical movements of the body that are generated by digital health technologies), superimposing older and newer modes of corporeal knowledge. Layers of Mediation Megan Rose. Silken Anatomies. Digital print on satin and yoryu silk chiffon. 2023. Ash Watson. Talking/Flowers. Collage and digital inkjet on paper. 2023. Fig. 6: Detail from Silken Anatomies. The ways that we come to sense and understand wellbeing are also mediated through the reproductive interplay of natural and technological elements. Silken Anatomies (fig. 6) was inspired by anatomical prints from the Renaissance showing details of the interiors of human bodies and organs together with living things and objects from the natural world. These webs of interconnectivity were thought to be key to wellbeing and health. Produced at scale through metal engraving and woodblock printing, these natural history and compendia took on major importance as part of these educational resources (Kemp; Swan). In an effort to extend the reach of artefacts beyond their tangible presence, libraries globally have sought to create open access digital scans of historic medical and botanical illustrations. The images reconfigured in Silken Anatomies were downloaded from the Wellcome Trust’s online archive and have been reimagined through digital enhancement and sublimation dye techniques. Referencing shrouds, the yoryu silk panels enfold exhibition visitors, who were able to touch and pass through the silks, causing them to billow in response to human movement. We bring together an animal-made material (crafted by silkworms) with more-than-human images featuring both humans and other living creatures. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical images are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously, through this piece. We can both see and touch these more-than-human illustrations that speak to us of the early modern natural science visualisations that underpin contemporary digital images of the human body and the more-than-human world. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical plates are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously. The digital is returned to the tangible. Fig. 7: Detail from Talking/Flowers. Even in increasingly digitised healthcare environments, paper and other printed materials remain central documents in the landscape of health and wellbeing. Zines are small-scale, DIY, and typically handcrafted publications, which are often made to express creators’ thoughts and feelings about health and wellbeing (Lupton "Health Zines"; Watson and Bennett). Talking/Flowers (fig. 7), a zine of visual and textual work, explores the materialities of health information and healthcare encounters by creatively layering a diverse range of materials: clippings from MRI scans, digitally warped and recoloured images from medical infographics, and found poetry made from research publications. In this way, the zine remixes and reconstitutes key documents of authority in health institutions which continue to take primacy as evidence. While vital in the pipeline of diagnosis and treatment, such documents can become black boxes of meaning, and serve to distance health professionals from consumers and consumers from agentic understandings of their own health. These evidentiary materials are brought together here with other imagery, textures, and recollections of personal experience; the pages also feature leaves, flowers, fungi, and oceanic tones. Oceans, pools, rivers, lakes, and other coastal forms or waterways offer all-consuming sensory spaces in which people can find calm, balance, buoyancy, and connection with the wider world. Aqua tides, purple eddies, and misshapen pearls flow through the pages as the golden thread of the zine’s aesthetic theme. Also featured are three original poems. The first and third poems, ‘talking to a doctor’ and ‘talking to other people’, explore moments of relational vulnerability. The second poem, ‘untitled’, is a found poem made from the conclusions of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s 1975 article on the sick role reconsidered. In each of these poems, information and communication jar the encounters and more-than-human metaphors hold space for complex feelings. The cover similarly merges imagery from botanical and historical medical illustrations with a silver shell, evoking the morphological dimensions that connect the more-than-human. Exhibition visitors were able to turn the pages of the original copy of the zine, and were invited to take a printed copy away with them. Conclusion More-than-Human Wellbeing is an exhibition which aims to expand the horizons of how we understand wellbeing and our entanglements with the world. Our exhibition was designed to draw on our research into the more-than-human dimensions of health and wellbeing in the context of an increasingly digitised and datafied world. We wanted to attune visitors to the relational connections and multisensory ways of knowing that develop with and through people’s encounters and entanglements with creatures, things, and spaces. We sought to demonstrate that in this digital age, in which digital devices and software are often considered the most accurate and insightful ways to monitor and measure health and wellbeing, multisensory and affective engagements with elements of the natural environment remain crucial to understanding our bodies and health. Through engagements with our artworks, we hoped that new capacities for visitors’ learning and thinking about the relational and distributed dimensions of more-than-human wellbeing would be opened. While traditionally thought of as human-centered, we explore human health and wellbeing as interconnected with both the natural and technological. We used materials from the natural world – timber, paper materials, and silk fabric – in our artworks to capture both the multigenerational traces and entanglements between humans and plant matter. Recent works of natural and cultural history have drawn attention to the mysterious and important worlds of the fungi kingdom and its role in supporting and living symbiotically with other life on earth, including humans as well as plants (Sheldrake; Tsing). We also made sure to acknowledge this third kingdom of living things in our artworks. We combined these images and materials from nature with digitised modes of printing and fabrication to highlight the intersections of the digital with the non-digital in representations and sensory feelings of health and wellbeing. We disrupt and make strange signs of traditional human-centric medicine through reconfigurations, bricolage, and re-imaginations of more-than-human wellbeing. As humans we are interconnected with the natural world, and the signs of these meetings can be traced and read. Through our artistic creations, we hope to re-orient people towards this more open way of thinking about wellbeing. Working with arts practices and creative data visualisations, both digital and analogue, we bring to the fore the role that more-than-human agents play in mediating and making these convivial more-than-digital connections. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) and a Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture collaboration grant. UNSW Library provided financial and curatorial support for the mounting of the exhibition. References Abram, David. "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." Planet. Volume 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Eds. Gavin van Horn et al. Center for Humans & Nature Press, 2021. 50-62. 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La Lyonnaise est la province gauloise la plus maritime, avec un trait de côte s’étendant sur plus de 3000 km de long. Ce travail de recherche concerne l’habitat dispersé (villae, fermes, ateliers) sur son littoral, du Ier au Vème siècle. Son objectif est de comprendre comment cette forme d’occupation et de gestion de l’espace rural a été adaptée au milieu géographique particulier qu’est le littoral. La question de la diffusion sur la façade Atlantique du phénomène des villae maritimes se pose également. Tout d’abord, les questions de typologie, de configuration et d’architecture des ensembles bâtis sont abordées. Ensuite, l’économie de ces établissements et en particulier l’exploitation des ressources maritimes est analysée. Bien que la documentation disponible soit ancienne et peu détaillée, des opérations archéologiques récentes ont contribué à renouveler les connaissances scientifiques sur le sujet, notamment sur les ateliers de salaisons et de sauces de poissons en Gaule et leurs productions
With a coastline of at least 3000 kilometers, the Roman province of Lugdunensis is the most maritime area of the Gallic territories. This thesis deals with the occupation of the coastal countryside, dotted with villae, farms and craft workshops, between the 1st and 5th centuries AD. The main objective is to understand how the rural areas were managed and how roman society adapted to and transformed this landscape. This study also addresses the question of the dissemination of “villae maritimae” along the Atlantic coast. Themes covered included the organisation of Roman coastal settlements and their architectural influences, the role of farms in the management and exploitation of marine resources, and lastly, the types of products produced. The archaeological information available for use is extensive although dated, difficult to exploit, and as a such the analysis suffers. However, several recent surveys and excavations have allowed for the collection of new data about Roman salting and fish sauce workshops in western Gaul. Atlantic Coast and English Channel

What happens once antiquities are excavated? Once removed from an excavated trench or the ocean bottom, legally obtained antiquities are today typically dispatched to a storage facility, either at the excavation site or in a neighboring city museum. The speed with which they are transferred...

Abstract Soon after his arrival in India, Paira Mall warned that it would become increasingly difficult to find good value manuscripts there: ‘Americans and Germans’, he said, ‘have ransacked the whole place, and paid exorbitant prices.’ Although Wellcome was unconcerned by Mall’s warning in 1911, and simply advised him ‘not to lose his head’, over the course of the next twenty years the perceived threat from wealthy American collectors would justify much of Wellcome’s own greed. He became a British citizen in 1910, and he increasingly saw it as his task to secure antiquities before they could be ‘carried away to America from whence they will never be returned’. Thompson had regularly detected ‘American buyers’ lurking in the background during his transactions, and by the late 1920s Wellcome’s senior collecting staff had become obsessed with the presence of ‘the Americans’, whose new money, it was implied, tarnished their discernment as collectors. Wellcome’s own American roots and self-made fortune seem to have been counterbalanced by his social and economic investment in Europe. Most importantly, however, the objects he acquired were destined to remain in London, so he could present himself as a champion of European history, acting on Europe’s behalf. In this regard the collecting world was split in two by the Atlantic Ocean, and Wellcome congratulated himself that his money was buttressing Old World glory.